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Alexandra Carter: The Mother Shell from Alexandra Carter

ARTIST STATEMENT

I paint the female body in states of transformation—pregnancy, birth, postpartum—to reveal the visceral realities of motherhood. I want to know how this experience consumes, ruptures, and remakes the self. I’m drawn to the monstrous feminine—the reproductive body as both feared and revered, vola

Growing up on a cranberry farm in Massachusetts, I was immersed in cycles of fertilization, growth, and harvest—rhythms that shape my work. Cranberries become metaphors for the reproductive body: swollen, fertile, bleeding. The harvest’s dependence on flooding echoes my fascination with contain

I often use my own body as a model, staging performances for the camera to explore personal and archetypal imagery. I draw from folklore and mythology, reimagining figures whose transformations mirror the physical and psychological shifts of motherhood. These mythic bodies—splitting, mutating—s

Through these paintings, I confront the contradictions of motherhood—its tenderness and violence, power and erasure, creation and consumption—an experience that is both universal and deeply personal.... more

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Alexandra Carter
Solar Flexion, 2024
Ink and 23k gold leaf on drafting film
17 x 14 in
$1,000

"Solar Flexion" is part of an ongoing exploration of what I call “the acrobatics of motherhood,” a visceral meditation on adaptation, endurance, and the absurd grace demanded by care. In this work, the maternal body takes on a doll-like form, her bulges suggesting pregnancy or the multiplicity of anatomy, while merging with protective plant structures—cactus, a plant ubiquitous in my Southern California surroundings. I am drawn to the cactus’s built-in armor, a metaphor for the resilience, vigilance, and strange contortions of the maternal body as it moves through care and protection.